Page - 239 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  239 in Vienna, the Association for Defense against Anti-Semitism (Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus) was established, with several University of Vienna professors as both founding fathers and ordinary members. Further, for a large number of scholars, confessional differences played no role in the academic process at all. The atmosphere surrounding the appointment of Jewish professors re- mained oppressive throughout the post-1867 period, and the visibility of anti-Semitic views increased after 1890. The university was not only be- coming a battleground, as a recent exhibition in Vienna has claimed,125 but turning the cities into one. In the 1880s the mathematician Seligman Kantor was a victim of street assaults, leading the faculty to consider him an inap- propriate candidate for a professorship.126 Shortly afterward, Kantor moved to Italy. The appointment of Jewish scholars to professorships led to student protests as well. In Vienna the press protested the appointments of Emil Zuckerkandl and Julius Tandler.127 In Innsbruck in 1900, during the appoint- ment procedure for the ophthalmologist Stephan Bernheimer, the faculty was confronted with a petition for the “purification of the University of Innsbruck from Jewish influence,”128 along with fierce protests by radical right-wing student organizations. The same university witnessed protests in response to August Haffner’s appointment as a professor of Semitic languages (he was transferred from the theological to the philosophical faculty).129 This tendency was strengthened by the gradual division in student life along re- ligious-national boundaries, resulting in the creation of parallel publics and aggravating potential conflicts.130 Divisions based on Christian confessions—Greek Catholic Ruthenians versus Roman Catholic Poles, and Protestant Hussite Czechs versus Roman Catholic Germans—had no obvious influence on appointments and ha- bilitations. For Jews, however, their nationality was defined through their confession, which resulted in their exclusion from other national groups, causing problems. For example, Alfred Přibram’s appointment as a full pro- fessor of history was blocked several times: in Vienna in 1899, where he was evidently omitted owing to his confession,131 and in Prague in 1900, when he was proposed primo loco but gained only a titular professorship.132 He was finally appointed ad personam in Vienna in 1913. Samuel Steinherz, a Jewish historian who worked extensively in Rome, acquired a full professorship in Prague owing to the direct support of influential scholars who intervened directly in Vienna, but the ministry rejected his appointment to Vienna, for which he was proposed primo loco, in 1908.133 When Szymon Askenazy was